NYC Mayor Eric Adams sues over Texas migrant busing, seeks $700M to cover city's cost

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, whose city continues to grapple with the tens of thousands of migrants sent by bus from Texas by Gov. Greg Abbott, counterpunched Thursday by filing a lawsuit accusing the program of being carried out with “evil intention” and of violating state law.

But the Democratic mayor isn't targeting the Republican governor in the 14-page court filing in New York's Supreme Court. Instead, the lawsuit goes after 17 bus companies hired by the state of Texas to shuttle migrants to numerous cities around the country, and accuses them of violating a New York law that states anyone who brings a "needy person" to the state to be cared for at public expense shall be held responsible for supporting that person.

The lawsuit seeks $708 million from the companies, which the Adams administration says is what the city has paid to provide food and shelter for the migrants bused from Texas.

Even though Abbott is not named as a defendant, Adams made clear he holds the Texas governor responsible for what has become a growing humanitarian crisis in New York and in other cities where migrants are being dropped off, such as Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia.

"Governor Abbott's continue use of migrants as political pawns is not only chaotic and inhumane, but makes clear he puts politics over people," Adams said in a statement on YouTube.

Abbott responded in kind, calling the lawsuit "baseless," and warned that the litigation might put the New York mayor in legal jeopardy of his own.

"Every migrant bused or flown to New York City did so voluntarily, after having been authorized by the Biden Administration to remain in the United States," Abbott said in a statement. "As such, they have constitutional authority to travel across the country that Mayor Adams is interfering with. If the Mayor persists in this lawsuit, he may be held legally accountable for his violations."

The statement did not elaborate on what accountability Adams might face. The governor did, however, acknowledge that the more than 83,000 migrants sent cross-country by Texas do have permission to remain in the United States pending additional legal proceedings.

More: As migration surges, immigration court case backlog swells to over 3 million

Abbott's bus program, part of his signature $11 billion border initiative called Operation Lone Star, has proven to be politically popular in conservative circles and has put Democratic mayors and governors in the affected states in the position of calling on the Biden administration to take more forceful action to curtail unlawful immigration.

Last month, Biden dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior administration officials to Mexico for talks with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on ways to curb the stream of migrants heading to the United States from Central and South America.

'Remarkable failure of governance'

And after nearly three years of playing defense against charges from Abbott and other top Republicans that Biden has rolled out the welcome mat for undocumented immigrants, the administration recently has been seizing opportunities to shift the narrative.

In an interview Wednesday on MSNBC, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was part of the U.S. delegation to Mexico, accused Abbott's policies of exacerbating the immigration crisis instead of solving it.

"Let me let me identify one fundamental problem here," Mayorkas told the cable network. "And that is the fact that we have one governor in the state of Texas who is refusing to cooperate with other governors and other local officials and coordinate efforts to address a challenge that our country ... is facing.

"It's a remarkable failure of governance to refuse to cooperate with one's fellow local and state officials."

Abbott responded on social media by saying "Mayorkas is pathetic," and he vowed to step up the pace of bus trips, and the recently started chartered flights, to move migrants out of Texas.

More: Gov. Abbott charters plane to Chicago for migrants after city impounded bus from Texas

In Adams' lawsuit, his administration says New York has already taken in 33,600 migrants from Texas, and that the bus companies are being paid far more per passenger by the state of Texas than they'd receive from traditional travelers.

According to the suit, Texas is paying the companies about $1,650 for each migrant they take to New York, whereas a single one-way bus ticket from Texas to New York would cost about $291. The suit calls the payments "a testament to bad faith and evil intent."

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: New York City mayor sues bus companies shuttling migrants from Texas